"Ya Hey"

It's  got all the standard Vampire Weekend tricks--catchy hook, drums mixed high, classical piano bouncing in and out, staccato guitar, plus the choir and autotune that suggest that band has a higher budget this time around, or at least that they're going for a slicker sound. The drums sound big & dumb & expensive (compare the sound of, say, "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance"), but that opening bassline makes me forgive it.

At RapGenius one can read that the song references reggae, Catholic ritual, the word "yahweh" ("the name of the Jewish God," although Christians would presumably argue he's theirs too), Outkast's song "Hey Yah," the story of  Moses & the burning bush, Richard Hofstadter. (Also: that Ezra Koenig is a fan of RapGenius.)

What's really striking, though, is that in this seemingly serious song you've got the chorus broken up by this ridiculous vocal effect, which is speaking a scrambled version of this word (the tetragrammaton) which religiously observant Jews are prohibited from saying. & one could no doubt pull this into a theory about the song's inner tensions et cet. but really why bother (although if one did, probably also worth looking at the line about the dj mixing reggae & the Rolling Stones)? What the chorus really makes clear is that Vampire Weekend are making fun of themselves, dropping silly sounds into their "serious song. It's the same impulse that makes the hook of another of their singles nothing more than "baby baby baby." The sound of a band refusing to "grow up" for their "mature" 3rd album--noting, "it's bad enough just getting old."

So that's why the album's alright, basically, not as strong as the debut but y'know. & of course Discovery was their best, but I digress.

New Mount Kimbie

Mount Kimbie released Cold Spring Fault Less Youth and Hyetal released Modern Worship (or if they haven't, they're going to, they've leaked), & they're both artists who released first a string of great singles, then instrumental albums (Crooks and Lovers and Broadcast respectively) in that weird post-dubstep continuum where the artists can't really be categorized because they have different goals and reference points and yet you've gotta group 'em because otherwise how the hell are you going to organize all this crazy shit that's coming out all the time, album after album, much of it very good, some of it even great (as the first Mount Kimbie album was, and we'll see abt these others in time), it's downright confusing. It's a time of artists, not movements, and as soon as a genre is named (footwork, future garage, synthwave &c.) it either dies down to boring formulas surely even the producers don't care about or splits to a million different impulses, hybridizing with everything it touches (so that for instance one half of Sepalcure, another of these post-dubstep guys, in this case from Canada, is also Machinedrum, an idiosyncratic footwork producer whose album Room(s) got a fair bit of deserved hype), or sometimes even doing both.

What's interesting here is that Mount Kimbie and Hyetal have both added vocals to their tracks on their 2nd albums, & that in both cases roughly the same thing happens--that is, we don't get songs (no boring verse-chorus-bridge, none of those godawful "hooks" some "musicians" insist on writing) and we don't get the typical "Dance Track feat. Diva Vocalist" b*llsh*t either (not that I have anything against House, but c'mon, it's 2013). Often the vocals are just completely unintelligible, and the singing not particularly competent (not just that the singer clearly hasn't taken lessons but also that they're not mic'd properly & so on).

Of course Mount Kimbie have done this a bit before, notably on "William," where you have these vague vocals for the song's middle section, which fades onto a peaceful instrumental beat, so that the vocals seem not so much a centerpiece as an interlude, a kind of textural digression. "Digression" really being the word for the vocals on the new album. The vocals don't guide the songs, but they aren't "just another instrument"--they become a particular sonic event. Here you should also notice that there's a lot more guitar in this album. Why? Because Mount Kimbie is injecting "humanity" into its album, fusing their laptop dabbling (the new sound of garage rock, really: it's a lot easier/cheaper to get together around a MacBook than find a practice space, and a lot easier in say an urban environment like, oh, London) with the more conservative electric guitar noodling that a million amateurs are doing in their shabby home studios. The first track is called "Home Recording."

This all adds up to an album which is really self-conscious, in a provocative way, about its  means of production. Because this is part of the reason post-dubstep is so idiosyncratic, and why the other electronic music genres developing lately are: the producers are isolated. They're doing this at home, by themselves, with one or two collaborators or none at all. A lot of producers try to efface this fact, some escape it entirely (e.g. James Blake, with Mount Kimbie the defining post-dubstep artist, used to tour with them even, has embraced r&b, which is a sound all about going into a studio, hiring session musicians, and so on; only, he's on his own, so he plays all the parts himself, with lackluster results mostly). What makes Mount Kimbie exciting, besides that they have all the skills necessary for making great electronic music (mastery of texture, rhythm, pacing) is that they're upfront about how their music is made. It's not amateur music pretending to be professional music, it's amateur music which takes that amateur status as the basis for its existence. It's the same trick Burial pulled off, in a different direction--the sound of Burial is basically the sound of a person hearing pirate radio broadcasts & fuzzy cassette mixtapes & imagining the rest of the sound from there, hence his use of rain noise (which replicates both radio static and his own environment when hearing the stuff), video game samples, and so on. Mount Kimbie use white noise as well, but it's the environmental white noise any amateur musician recognizes from using a cheap mic in a room w/out soundproofing.

 

So that's what I dig abt the new Mount Kimbie, and wut makes it more exciting, I'd say, than a million slick dance albums by producers who've mastered sidechaining (or for that matter robot-headed producers who inspired the whole sidechaining thing, & most of the others soundz of EDM, but have now retreated to late-70s/early-80s excess & retreading disco tropes that were much more lively the first time).

Destroyer - Kaputt

The 80s revival is in full swing. Did anyone think it would last this long? If genre revivals go in 20-year cycles, as some suggest, we were due to reach '91 last year. And yet we had one 80s album after another: the synthpop/dreampop stylings of M83, the taut New Wave of The Drums, the entire chillwave genre (in particular, efforts by Neon Indian and Washed Out). And this: Kaputt, the ninth studio album by Destroyer.

At the Mountains of Madness

Lovecraft clouds his stories. He puts them in the mouths of the disturbed, people who doubt their own memory and have little hope of being believed. He bloats them with wordy, technical language. And sometimes—as in At the Mountains of Madness—he floats them in an air of foreboding, of constant portentous dread: the story is one that, says the narrator, "I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors", one about "that which may end the world we know" if not left alone.

At the Mountains of Madness is horror—it advertises itself as such. But all of that air of foreboding does something to disconnect the reader, and the tale isn’t particularly scary. There are weird monsters and huge revelations, but the narrator has warned about them from the very beginning. They’re too strange to be anything but surprising, but at the same time they aren’t quite shocking: the narrator’s breathless tone inoculates the reader. The sights and sounds have terrified the narrator, but they can’t do the same to the reader. They feel more intriguing than scary.

It’s that sense of intrigue that makes the story work. The story’s speaker has told you, again and again, about the terror of the events, the significance of the world revealed. In that respect there’s nothing left for the imagination. But because the speaker has already taken wonder and horror to their extremes, the reader can leave both these impulses aside. What’s left is only the thrill of discovery, the joy of a mysterious place being unveiled. Here Lovecraft isn’t scary—he’s only exciting.

Merzbow

Merzbow’s sounds are often called "harsh noise." Which is fair: his tracks have no melody, no harmony, and often nothing like rhythm. They don't have hooks to remember; they don't have recurring themes or sounds. Even when a texture persists for several minutes, it's only a matter of time until it stops and is replaced by unrelated others. The sounds are very dissonant and contain high frequencies which most people find grating. Merzbow's tracks sound more like factory machines or explosions than like conventional music.

After reading Infinite Jest

The book is light-blue: a cool color, peaceful. As if it's saying, "Don't panic." Because panic you very well might: it's over a thousand pages long, bigger than most textbooks, and a quick flip through reveals paragraphs that go on page after page, nary a chapter break in sight. And one-hundred pages of footnotes. In his introduction Eggers gives his best pep talk, claiming that when you finish Infinite Jest "you are a better person,” and the back cover is full of glowing blurbs; but it remains imposing.

And then in the first few pages you read about Hal Incandenza, a teenage prodigy who reads the dictionary for fun. That's got to be a challenge, a toss-down of the gauntlet. Surely Wallace is saying: "If he can read dictionaries, can't you at least read a measly thousand pages?" It's  not as if it's dry reading, after all; when it's not heartbreaking, it's damned funny.

Favorite tracks of 2011

The 60 tracks that as of January 4 2012 I liked best, in (nearly) arbitrary order:

60: Sepalcure - See Me Feel Me

59: Kowton  - Drunk on Sunday

58: Kode 9 & the Spaceape - Love Is the Drug

57: Wire - Two Minutes

56: Kahn - Illy

55: Morgan Zarate - Hookid

54: Breton - RDI (Girl Unit remix)

53: Isolee - Trop Pres de Toi (97 Interlude)

52: Gil-Scott  Heron and Jamie xx - Home

51: Peverelist - Dance Til the Police Come

50: Mosca - Bax

49: Dexter - Great Northern Diver